Hello Everyone!

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 413!

A Big Storm Rolls In, Rationing Food Is Tricky, Kitchen Daydreams, Shuffling My eXode Collection & Some Cagey Thinking

I did not have an easy time falling asleep last night after having taken that long nap in the afternoon yesterday. I was up quite late and although drinking black tea was assuredly not helping me get to sleep... I kept drinking it anyway as I watched one science fiction movie after another until I finally dozed off somewhere close to dawn. Instead of sleeping the day away I wound up getting up a few hours later and decided to just stay up and not further skew my sleep cycle by resting all day. Not that I have been on much of a consistent sleep cycle of late but it is nice to at least try to get it back to some semblance of normalcy. Not drinking coffee at night was awesome until I backslid and began doing it again a few months ago and then later after stopping again perhaps I should have chosen something besides caffeinated tea because whoa can I consume a heck of a lot of tea in a rather short time!

Another big storm system rolled in while I was snoozing this morning and although the wind has not yet been blowing hard it is supposedly going to be picking up steadily throughout the evening hours. It has sprinkled rain on and off also throughout the day but again it looks like the bulk of the rain will be occurring tonight. Once all that blows over it looks as if the temperatures are going to immediately start dropping and there is going to be over a week (or more) of chilly weather ahead. Like I said before it has been an incredibly mild winter here and hopefully we get some more prolonged freezes to help thwart the tick and other pest populations some before things start warming up again. Heck, just getting rid of some of the flies would be a nice start especially since the one fly bag trap that I had hung in a tree near the chicken coop broke sometime back and I have failed to replace it yet.

The main part of that storm is just now arriving here and it sure is making some big booms in the distance. Hopefully the grid does not fail and I can get this all typed up and shared today. I am also trying to get all my cooking done before it does because I have been mainly cooking indoors on my electric hot plate instead of outdoors on the propane stove. At some point I really need to get a real (either indoor or even outdoor) kitchen setup because it always seems like its such a pain in the butt to cook on the little single burner indoors (which is just meant for making coffee with) or having to wait for favorable conditions outdoors to do my cooking that way.

The indoor cooking has really been getting on my nerves of late because the cabin smells like food a lot which just makes me feel hungry and given that I have been stretching my supplies to the 'nth degree' (to avoid having to make a supply run) having those smells around do not make rationing all that easy. I am not exactly complaining there because I am super grateful to have any food at all but like I said it makes exerting self-control in that regard a bit more daunting of a task than it has been for me in the past when I was not cooking indoors. Rationing is never an easy task to start with and in my experience anything that makes it more difficult needs to be looked at closely and a solution (or workaround) has to be found as soon as possible. There is a lot to be said for sheer willpower but I think (for me at least) its best to not have to over-utilize that too much.

Anyway, I spent much of my day once again piddling around on the computer and although most of it was non-productive (reading the news, watching some videos etcetera) I did put some time into sorting through the bulk of my eXode cards and updating the prices because it is looking like price of HIVE might remain continue to remain high. It is a cryptocurrency so who knows but it has stayed well above a dollar now for quite some time so I feel okay adjusting the prices accordingly. I also had a bunch of cards listed over a gradient of prices (trying to determine the market value by what sold and what did not) so I set about normalizing most of them to what I think is a fair (or fair enough) price. Although I should also be checking out the latest gameplay features I just keep putting it off for one reason or another but like I said early on just collecting and trading the cards is a heck of a lot of fun for me to start with and I have derived most of my satisfaction from doing just that. I did at one point get my planet NFT and do the preliminary scanning for what resources it holds as well as for finding available landing sites but honestly I am just patiently waiting for the game to get closer to beta and out of alpha before really diving into the gameplay aspect of it.

All that jazz aside, I had forgotten how challenging it is to write something even slightly meaningful each day and not get lost down one rabbit warren or another in the process. I mean its nice to peak down the rabbit hole and see if I can see anything in there worth writing about but all too often it is like I fall head first into it regardless of how I feel about it. Writing compulsively has its merits though and as long as I am willing to tediously peck away at the keys one train of thought somehow always leads to another and alas something gets written. Since writing trash is not all that appealing to me I just do my best to keep it all somehow relevant and not rant and rave overly much. Which I wind up doing anyway from time to time so go figure.

Over the course of the last year I have heavily considered stopping all this sharing jazz completely because to be blunt there is just too much damn sketchy stuff going on in this country and I dislike the notion of folks looking at me for their meal ticket when/if things really start to fall apart. I am sure that I am not the only one that has had such thoughts and I have definitely noticed a lot of folks go inactive (with sharing) over the previous few years and I cannot help but wonder if that played a part in their decision making or not. Taking the precautions that can be taken though (like scrubbing all that EXIF data) and being careful with how much I reveal surely helps me sleep easier at night but still in the not-so-grand-scheme of things sharing absolutely nothing is the most secure route. Unfortunately it is also a very unfulfilling route and for those of us who count on it for making a semblance of a living it makes it a very complicated choice to make.

Not to make light of it but I often wonder what would be worse: People that I know showing up or total strangers! I am kind of thankful that I am not one of those extreme preppers sitting on a decade worth of food because whoa that must be a nightmare considering that most folks like that tend to tell anyone and everyone about what they have hoarded away. I know the more serious preppers tend to be pretty tight lipped about what they do (or do not) have and my best advice for anyone doing small or large preps is to follow that same rule of thumb about it. I guess that the same could be said about having large gardens, honey bees or any number of things that maybe if folks are not directly helping with... why the heck tell them about it in the first place! Undoubtedly at this phase of things I am a bit paranoid that things will eventually fall apart but I also think that anyone who is not looking at the same possible eventuality is ignoring the warning signs and living in some sort of fantasy land whilst daydreaming about a world of yesteryear that is now gone. Not that I am being judgmental about it because hey whatever helps folks sleep at night is fine by me but a little (or a lot) of caution is by far not a bad idea.

Well, I did not intend to end this on such a cagey note but if I am going to get this edited and posted I better call it good enough and get to doing those two un-enjoyable tasks. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.